Dr Marie Stopes, 1914
Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was born in Scotland, daughter of a leading archaeologist and a literature scholar. In 1902, she graduated with a BSc at the Uni College London in only 2 years, winning the Gold Medal for biology. In her mid-20s, she crawled into hazardous coal mines in Lancashire, collecting spectacular ancient plant fossils. Her labour illuminated the origin of coal, the British Empire fuel!
Her Prof Francis Oliver was progressing in plant evolution. Also passionate for scientific research, Stopes went to the Uni of Munich to study the sexual habits of primitive plants, learned German and earned her PhD in paleo-botany in 1904. And another PhD from Uni College London! Then Stopes became the first female lecturer at the Uni of Manchester.
In 1907 Britain's respected scientific institution, The Royal Society of London, sent Stopes on an 18-month expedition to Japan. She was to solve a problem that had earlier mystified Charles Darwin: the evolutionary origin of flowers. Stopes left for northern Hokkaido Island where she dug up fossils that perfectly addressed Darwin's dilemma.
Stopes was British science’s rising star. In 1910 the Canadian Government invited her to resolve a dispute about the age of New Brunswick rocks. Analysing the Canadian fossils back at the British Museum London, she cut through years of confusion and resolved the dispute! Men were astounded.
In 1911 Stopes married a fellow scientist, Reginald Gates but their disastrous marriage collapsed in a year and was annulled. Also in 1911 she found many books about human sexuality locked in a cupboard at the British Museum. Rifling through, she finally understood Gates’ impotence. She had been an educated scientist who was naïve about her own sex life!!
How did this young palaeontologist change Western society? Stopes became committed to increasing her knowledge of sexual ethics and reproductive physiology. A seminal influence was Havelock Ellis (1859–1939).
She met American pioneer Margaret Sanger in London’s Fabian Hall in July 1915, as later discussed in Sanger’s book My Fight for Birth Control. The rivalry between Stopes and Sanger began when Sanger wanted to open a contraceptive clinic in London, after her newly opened clinic in the US was raided by police.
Stopes’ sad marriage justified her campaign for sexual reform and led to the first sex manual written in the UK, Married Love (1918). But it took another two years before she could find a printer. On the book’s release, Stopes’ fame boomed. Many letters, written by women thanking Stopes for her work, have since been archived.
In 1918, Stopes married Humphrey Roe and happily had a son, Harry Stopes-Roe. Humphrey shared her interest in contraception; as a manufacturing magnate, he had seen the effects unplanned childbearing had on his female workforce.
The success of Married Love was quickly followed by Wise Parenthood, a guide to contraception. Then Radiant Motherhood (1920) and later Enduring Passion. She used physiological terms for the first time in popular works, to give the books gravitas.
Stopes opened the first UK family planning clinic on Mar 1921 in Marlborough Rd North London. The Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control was financed by the couple, hiring only female doctors and nurses to make patients more comfortable. The clinic offered a free service to married women, dispensed rubber cervical caps and distributed contraceptives by mail order.
The first London family planning clinic opened in 1921
Photo credit: Marie Stopes: a biography
A mobile contraceptive clinic
Naturally Stopes faced opposition from the Anglican and Catholic Churches and medical community. She responded by distributing pamphlets and making public speeches. In 1923, Catholic Dr Halliday Sutherland libelled Stopes in his book Birth Control. He argued that birth controllers were using the poor for scientific experimentation. Stopes sued Halliday but lost the case amongst bitterly divisive publicity.
In the 1920s Stopes opened other clinics, including in a fully equipped caravan. In 1930 she formed the National Birth Control Council/later Family Planning Association.
University College London Bloomsbury was where the contributions Francis Galton etc made to biometrics, genetics and archaeology were famous. Less well known was their contribution to establishing and legitimising eugenics i.e the science of improving human populations via selective breeding. In fact Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, the roots of the movement being at UCL, not Nazi Germany.
Stopes was a product of her age, when intellectual life in Britain was already coloured by eugenics. Stopes had been friendly with Francis Galton since childhood, so she joined the Eugenics Education Society early and became a life fellow in 1921.
Poster advertising a public lecture by Stopes, 1927
Stopes advocated for the sterilisation of people seen as unfit for parenthood. Her views were being promoted by the Nazis, so in 1935 she attended a Nazi Congress for Population Science in Berlin. And in 1939 she wrote a gushy personal letter to Adolf Hitler, enclosing her love poetry.
She wanted to improve the quality of Britain’s genetics so she called for new laws that allowed the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” to be sterilised and wrote strongly against interracial marriage.
Dr Marie Stopes died from breast cancer in 1958. That year Anglican Bishops at the Lambeth Conference accepted that procreation was not the sole purpose of Christian marriage. Her legacy was represented through the organisation Marie Stopes International which provided reproductive health services to millions of people in 35+ countries.
Thankfully her works on reproductive rights and feminism were heroic. She had defied the churches and the male-dominated medical establishment!!
on her Upper Norwood London home.